Verde, Chichilo, Negro

We are going to roast and toast and fry all the other ingredients and then grind them all silky smooth, and then fry it. When we fry the moles, we fry in batches, and we always use a clay cazuela or for a big fiesta in like a big bathtub. You stir with a gerote, its like this big stick. That’s how they do the moles, in these large vessels, because you want to fry with a big surface area at the bottom. We usually fry all the ingredients with oil and then that last part we fry that mixture with a paste and fry it in lard.

Lard is like the great stabilizer. It also has a great bottom flavor. We have all these different flavor tones. There are some base tones which are the lard and sweeter things. The high tones are more like the acidics. We are constantly playing with that to get a balance of flavor. A lot of people try to get the balance of flavor by adding salt, salt, salt. You can’t do it that way, you have to do it by adding stocks and different ingredients. You cook the meat, you soften the meat, because in the old days they would have hunted for the meat, and they would catch a wild boar, or several wild boars, or jackalopes, or whatever they were cooking. They would sacrifice the animal and they would stew it for hours and hours so they could chew the meat. You get all this fabulous broth and that’s what they would use to reconstitute the mole paste. You always make the paste first.

The mole negro that we made today is all about the ratio of ingredients. One thing about the moles too, is that you always eat with a tortilla which is an edible spoon. The tortilla is really important in the balance of the corn versus the flavors of the dominant chiles. When you go to these big fiestas there will be hundreds of people sitting and there is not a fork or a spoon in sight. There are just these beautiful embroidered serviettes with tortillas. Soft tortillas, and you just rip it and that’s how everybody eats the mole. Real mole is never eaten with a fork or spoon.

-Chef Susanna Trilling, from the video, Verde, Chichilo, Negro